Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (20 page)

“But if I said no, Andy, it also wouldn’t happen. So why not kill me? Let Herman do it, it could be an early Christmas present for the boy.”

Wright’s face tightened. He was done being my Dutch Uncle. I didn’t care, I went on.

“And if you’re going to try and blackmail me by saying you’re going to pin Kraemer’s and Allen’s murders on me, I’m not scared of that. I know Herman tried to set things up that way, but I know too much - and you wouldn’t want me starting a conversation with the authorities, would you?”

“We don’t have to kill you, Mr. Bowman. And we don’t have to frame you. We have other means.”

Mr. Barry Filer reached into another jacket pocket and pulled out a folded photo. He handed it to me with a knowing smirk.

I unfolded it and looked at it for a long time.

It was Lorie’s mug shot.

Retreat

I wasn’t in the mood for Claude Bachman.

Not that there ever would be a time when I was in the mood for Claude Bachman, but this was the worst possible moment for me to encounter a dopey survivalist who had thrown away any semblance of a normal life to play Checkpoint Charlie for a bunch of murderous psychopaths who happened to have a huge billion-dollar playground in the middle of nowhere.

“You better slow down,” PMA said. He knew I had lost my shit but he didn’t know why. What he did sense was, as my car approached Claude Bachman’s makeshift gate at way too high a speed, I was seriously considering slamming the gas pedal to the floor and ramming through it – mostly because I desperately wanted to get to the next bar without having to engage in conversation with a moron who couldn’t even afford clothes that moths hadn’t made their mark on.

But I stopped. I didn’t want to…but I stopped.

Claude was a little taken aback by the sound of squealing brakes, so he quickly waddled out of his shack in a dither. He saw us and recognized us, so hope briefly flourished in my heart that he would simply raise the gate and let me go on my way. But no, I had been to the enchanted land and, like a munchkin who had been denied entry to Oz, he wanted all the secrets of the magical center of his demented universe.

He waddled over to the driver’s side. Wonderful. I quickly lowered the window, so I could finish this quickly.

“Good day, sir!” he bellowed as he approached.

“I’m in a hurry, can you raise the gate?”

He didn’t do that. What he did was lean into the open window. The price of passage was having to talk to him.

“Well, most certainly. Just wanted to ask if I may, how was your visit? How are things in the Dark Sky community?”

“They’re getting ready to make the world safe for white people like you. So don’t worry your pretty little smelly head.”

He looked at me with some confusion, not sure if I was joking or actually tuning in on his wavelength.

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

“I mean, you and the rest of your paranoid bigoted subhuman clan of pussies who piss their pants at the thought of progress in any form are going to be fine. You can continue to claim to own Jesus, the Bible, the Constitution, the fucking Declaration of Independence and, of course, the American flag and you can continue to pretend all of those things are full-on in favor of you keeping your foot on the throat of every person of color, condemning to eternal damnation every sexual act outside of heterosexual marriage, despising and invalidating every other religion outside of yours and teaching your children that America has never done anything remotely wrong in its entire two-hundred-and-thirty-nine year history.”

A couple of beats. PMA was staring at me as though I was experiencing a complete psychotic break.

“What?”

“RAISE THE FUCKING GATE.”

He waddled back as fast as he could to the booth.

“AND SHOVE THAT SWORD UP YOUR ASS!”

The gate went up and I hit the gas pedal. In my rear view mirror, I saw him standing there like a poor faithful dog who had no idea why his master had just kicked him across the room. I briefly felt guilty, but only briefly. I didn’t have room for any more emotions.

The Dark Sky assholes had gotten all the files out of my computer, every last one of them, through that fucking goddam flash drive. That included all the documents I had stored on Lorie’s arrest. That’s how they knew right where to hit me and they took their best swing. Wham, home run.

I still remembered the call.

It was a slow morning at the Agency when my phone rang. A voice identified itself as being from the sheriff’s office in Salisbury, Delaware.

“Are you Lorie Bowman’s father?”

“Yes.”

“We have her in custody.”

“For what?”

“Murder.”

You don’t forget anything about that kind of moment.

After I left Allison - for nobody, that’s how bad it was – the kids didn’t take it well. No kids do. I did my best, taking them on weekends, but a part-time dad wasn’t a real one. The split affected them both in very different ways. Grace became more and more of a steel-eyed machine, suppressing any feelings, while my youngest, Lorie, went the other way – she melted down and became an emotional basket case.

I knew Allison was badmouthing me to all her friends in front of them. Grace was receptive to the poison, but Lorie was more than a little conflicted. One day, she asked me why I hated babies, and that’s when I knew she had found out about the abortion, which Allison and I had supposedly agreed to hide from the kids. In the end, I couldn’t fight the constant stream of anti-dad propaganda they were fed Monday through Friday – and, as the kids grew older, they began cancelling the weekends. And then they barely saw me at all.

Allison, meanwhile, had gone back to working at the Agency, where she quickly found her next victim, a repressed shlub named Edgar who had little experience with women and even less with children. Unfortunately, it turned out he hated kids – but Allison turned the other way when he started raining verbal abuse on ours for such severe sins as having the TV volume up too high. Grace, the tough one, merely let it bounce off her steel skin. That left Lorie, who took most of his heat and took it to heart.

When she hit her teens, Lorie went into full rebellion, piercing her nose, dying her hair and embracing the emo culture of the time. She also cut herself. When she got out of high school, she moved out as fast as she could and not to college, because she didn’t keep up her grades and hated school. Instead, she moved in with a local rock guitarist.

That relationship didn’t last and she was devastated. 

Unable to cope, she moved in with Grace, who had already graduated from college and had a staff job at an internet company in Delaware. But she was still obsessed with the rocker. She talked him into spending one more night with her - but when the morning came, so did her wake-up call:  The relationship itself was over as far as he was concerned.

I saw her a few months later and noticed her stomach was a little big. Was she…? “No!” she yelped. She had always had weight issues and I should keep my mouth shut. I did, thinking no more about it. A couple of months later, I got that call from the sheriff’s office and found out they were holding her for suspected murder. And I had the sensation of falling off a cliff I didn’t even know I was standing on.

She had indeed been pregnant – and, after she had given birth in a bathroom at a party at a friend’s house, she dumped it into the trash can outside on the curb.

The next morning, the cops picked up Lorie at Grace’s place, where she was alone – her sister was at work. Lorie, when she was booked, for some reason gave the cops my number. Maybe she didn’t want Edgar to find out. Maybe she wanted to see what I would do. Who knows, I didn’t.

Allison got her out on bail, because I was still dead broke from the divorce. But then there was the defense attorney, who wanted a huge retainer to take on Lorie’s case. I was expected to contribute half. I didn’t have it. That’s when I made the mistake of going to my father.

I had already borrowed some money some years earlier because I just couldn’t make it when I was paying both alimony and child support. So far, I had been unable to pay him back – I was up to my neck in credit card debt.  But I thought he might understand this situation. It wasn’t about me, it was about my daughter, his granddaughter, and doing what we could to keep her out of jail for the rest of her life. But he was still pissed off about my divorce, even more pissed off about the money I already owed him and he made it clear nothing else would be forthcoming. I fought a little because this was the kind of situation when a family came together instead of pointing figures and resurrecting old grudges.

That’s when he blamed me for the dead baby.

A screaming match ensued, and my part in it wasn’t anything to be proud of. When my father passed away from cancer three years later, I discovered that I had been disowned. By that time, I was also persona non grata with Allison and my kids. She had gotten the money together through other means but never stopped telling everyone around her how I had failed when my daughter needed me most.

The ironic part was that the case against Lorie had come to nothing – it seemed like the D.A. had overreached by charging her with murder in the first when he would have a hard time proving it. The case went away and Lorie moved back in with Allison and Edgar.

I had lost my parents, my kids and a grandson, all in one fell swoop. I started drinking and didn’t stop. I showed up late for work on those days when I showed up at all. My work got sloppy. And finally the CIA and I agreed on the fact that I shouldn’t work there anymore. I got a decent severance package and Howard said he would do what he could in terms of throwing me an occasional freelance job. He couldn’t be too open with his support, because his lovely wife Janet was close friends with Allison, but he still ended up coming through for me on the sly. Which was why I couldn’t hate Howard for the betrayal. He was put in a position where he didn’t have much choice. Just like I was now in a position where I didn’t have much choice.

Andrew Wright had made it clear during the rest of our talk in The Tank that he had a lot of clout with the law enforcement community. He told me what I already knew, that there was no statute of limitations on murder. And he let me know in no uncertain terms that he would see to it that the Salisbury D.A. would go ahead and press formal charges against my daughter unless I did what he was requesting. Of course, the charges might not stick. Of course, Wright might be bluffing about the whole thing. It didn’t matter. What mattered was any chance of the dead-and-buried case being brought back to horrifying life. My daughter would be traumatized all over again. Expensive lawyers would have to be hired again. Headlines might pop up in the newspaper again.

And it would all be my fault.

“Are you okay?” PMA asked me, shaking me out of my self-pity. “What’d they do to you in there?”

I didn’t answer, because I finally saw, up the road, a ratty old bar that had a “CASINO” sign in front of it. Turned out, in Montana, you could call yourself a casino even if you only had one old slot machine that only took quarters sitting in the corner. I ordered a double Jack on the rocks. And it was gone quicker than you could lose twenty-five cents in that one-armed bandit.

“So what’s going on?” PMA sat at the bar, staring at me knocking back my drink, and getting increasingly agitated by my state.

I slammed my empty glass on the bar and motioned for another. “I don’t want to get into it. But we’re going back to your house and I’m going to lie to your grandfather.”

The kid didn’t object. “That’s probably the best thing. My uncle…his fucking face… He’s so messed up.”

“Yeah. Join the club,” I said as my next Jack arrived. “By the way, you’re driving from here on, I don’t care if you don’t have an ID, because I’m getting fucked up as fast as I can.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to Missoula. We’ll fly back tomorrow.”

“But, Jesus, Max, we have to do something about this. We have to do something about Dark Sky, nobody knows what they’re up to. I mean, shit, how much money is the Pentagon feeding them?”

Money.

Andrew Wright wanted me to believe all this madness was just about one old man not wanting to hurt another old man. He wanted me to believe there was indeed a shred of human decency in him and to trust in fairy tales that never had a happy ending. Well, of course, the truth was good ol’ Andy wasn’t worried at all about General Davidson’s well-being. He was worried about
his fucking funding.
If this shit got out, and it might if the General made a big media stink about all this, Congress might turn off the spigot – and Dark Sky might really go dark.

Money and power. It was always really about money and power.

“Kid, you and I can’t do anything about it.”

“We could tell our story…”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

I just shook my head.

“We just can’t.”

We spent our last night on the road in the same hotel in Kalispell where we crashed the night before. I took the last two pain pills I had from the Booneville pharmacy and washed them down with the rest of the bottle of Jack, then spent the night delirious in bed as the ghosts came out of the walls to scream at me. My ex-parents. My ex-wife. My ex-children. My ex-life.

Jesus.

Thursday morning.

I got up in the middle of the night, drunk, tired and wired. The kid was asleep, so I went over to the desk in the room, fired up the Chromebook and, just for fun, started researching the so-called COIN warfare in Afghanistan a few years back just to see if I could find if there had been any sightings of a crazed killer with a trick rifle. There were none that I could find.

Instead, I found out about the tomahawks.

Night raids in Afghanistan were conducted with, according to a
New York Times
article, “primeval tomahawks.” Holy shit, really? And the tomahawks were custom-made by a guy in North Carolina, Daniel Winkler, who also provided the Native American weaponry for the 1992 version of
The Last of the Mohicans
. According to the article, the tomahawks were financed by “private donors.” A Seal Team 6 member confirmed that he himself witnessed some “hatchet kills.”